Courtesy of Lona Foote

Oct. 15 was the last stop on Shu Lea Cheang’s month-long trip of screening her debut feature film, “Fresh Kill,” for its 30-year anniversary. Accompanied by filmmakers Jean-Paul Jones and Jazz Franklin, she was able to showcase this film across 20 different cities and ended in Santa Barbara. It was the third installment in the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Panic! Series, and was followed by a Q&A with Cheang and moderated by Jigna Desai, director of the Center for Feminist Futures.

“Fresh Kill” certainly isn’t the average mainstream movie. Cheang herself labeled her film as a “science fiction, new queer” area of cinema.

“There’s all these different genres, different descriptions that I tried to label myself [as] rather than being just labeled as experimental. So with all these different terms, I try to describe [with] my own words,” Cheang said.

The story centers around a young lesbian couple, Claire and Shareen, who are living in the midst of a near-apocalyptic world strewn with industrial waste and consumed by a digital culture. The camera voyeurs on the lives of the rich and poor, exposing the suffering which marginalized communities experience at the expense of capitalist deities. Although its runtime is relatively short, Cheang uses these characters to build a vibrantly sinister dystopia of New York City within the span of 80 minutes.

The audience is taken through separate stories, different points of view on how people are living in this electronic wasteland, a cyberspace hell. A sickly green glow emanates from fresh fish leading to a cat food recall, people start speaking in a garbled language, digital equipment clutters dumpsters, garages, apartments and from this rises a hilariously accurate craze towards sustainable living. The narrative is disjointed and nonlinear at times, but the frenetic energy is what makes “Fresh Kill” work. The hyperfast editing, a style Cheang refers to as “channel surfing” in the 80s, intersperses strangely subliminal TV clips with blurred dialogue. The effect is an infinitely interesting journey, one that charges into the unknown.

“One, two, three, ‘Fresh Kill,’” announced Jones as he captured a selfie with the audience. This was right before the Q&A began, in which Cheang discussed the thematic elements of “Fresh Kill” and dove into a retrospective analysis on her career. Throughout her experience inside and out of the film scene, Cheang has lived through periods of mass hysteria, a common theme which she has implemented throughout varying films.

“At the time I decided to call the film eco-cyber-noia, and so it’s interesting coming back and thinking about this as a paranoia,” Cheang said. “It’s the feeling, the sense of paranoia about what would come if cyberspace arrived.”

In a sense, Cheang managed to predict her future, the one we live in now.

“It really works with the whole advent of technology and at the same time embracing the technology, feeling the infiltration, the intervention, that we can do with technology,” Cheang said.

Even though the film was based upon Cheang’s experiences in the 80s and filmed during the early 90s, it was tremendously ahead of its time.

“Everybody [was] out on the street, doing documentation, [calling] ourselves sort of media activists. It’s the first time that activists actually [had] a camera and documented our own movement rather than relying on the mainstream media,” Cheang said when describing the 80s.

Her film stands as a product of its time, but it also transcends it. The 80s saw a queer, multiracial community battling for recognition while simultaneously grappling with the devastation of AIDS. The backdrop of waste and cyber dystopia allowed Cheang to explore these marginalized communities caught in a world driven by corporate greed and environmental neglect.

“Of course, racially there’s tons of different [sources of] friction, particularly because at the time in the 80s, it was the first time Hollywood realized that they [could] do nontraditional casting, meaning that you could cast non-white people in a film,” Cheang said.

Her decision to entwine people of different racial backgrounds, particularly in a family that subverts traditional norms, was groundbreaking. Cheang noted that the end result portrays the characters as “a kind of alternative family,” a community of people of all races, ethnicities and sexual orientations. For Cheang, this “alternative family” mirrored her own experiences and the communities she found herself a part of in New York.

Cheang’s obsession with waste, particularly industrial waste, is a recurring theme throughout “Fresh Kill” and her later work.

“I’m quite obsessed with trash, I guess. Manhattan dumps the waste onto Staten Island, [the] Taiwanese government dumps nuclear waste on Orchid Island,” Cheang said, drawing parallels to the environmental injustice portrayed in the film. She also noted that the poisoned fish in “Fresh Kill” becomes a haunting metaphor, returning injustices to “haunt the city people.” This theme continues in her latest work, “UKI,” which focuses on electronic waste, especially the dumping of waste in Africa.

The relevance of “Fresh Kill” today is undeniable.

“I think at the same time I was very touched as throughout this trip is to realize there’s always puzzles and puzzles of activism going on,” Cheang noted, reflecting on her experiences. “The puzzles are different resistances, different people, different communities and I really believe these [people] are a kind of alternative family, [an] alternative community will all come together and make something, have a big breakthrough.”

Over her extensive career as a filmmaker and activist, Cheang has never lost sight of her ambition for social and political change. This sense of community and solidarity has always been at the heart of Cheang’s work and it remains her message of hope for the future. When asked if she still feels energized, socially engaged or motivated by activism today, she responded with quiet but certain affirmation: “[On] this final day, this conclusion of the trip and this final screening, I would say yes. I do.”